Black Freighter

I guess asylum seekers will have to hang in there under the jail.

I make inaudible rebel art; our revolutionary potentials ground into powder, then mist, then conversation. Conversations emptied into fourth floor sewers (insert fourth floor of any institution here). Conversation topics including the political party within the political party within a society’s death date.

When social contradictions heighten, all talents leave the world. All institutions are abandoned (they just don’t know it yet). I write poems and see people hooks in people cheeks; see a bureaucracy’s bicentennial; one big bible for imperialists. The ruling class disposing of shadows, or artists who need to be shot down. I am running guns in place for a packed theater. I write and participate: the paranoid versus the paranoid proper versus the white picnic. Southern trees bare a strange response to pandemic.

“Capitalism is a death cult,” most wisdoms agree. School teachers’ faces carved into the handles of our shovels heralding a new change in the division of labor: we will all work only one more time. As imperialism heads toward the final curtain, poets might as well play with fire because for all of our bibliographies, it will be the bullet. I am hiding from Baldwin Hills friends; hiding from talented Harlem because I no longer have confidence in genius during unorganized revolutionary tides. How do you challenge power only on the page? How do you truly drown a reactionary mind?

In recent decades, oppressed people both lost the class war and opportunity to learn from loss. Ahistorical civilian-saviors flood the streets with their art and intellectual conversations. Very white and white-adjacent. The new city-universe brimming with anti-rank-and-file matter. Around semi-corporate, reused species-beings, I try to write something original; or at least an original reiteration of locales of reality. Half reading my bus transfer, half reading the tents; the objective becoming to create art while taking advantage of the fact that we all live in one city now.

My head knows that there has been a dream; but my heart sees no evidence of true political resistance nor the spiritual cultivation of art. I see state power versus tens of millions of door hinges and people who still believe they are not dialectically part of a social side. Citations over Ferguson doorways; apparently our taste of power was only a conversation starter. Well-timed gun fantasies refilling the political void in imperialism’s collapsing anatomy. Fishing in gas stations for movie plots, my spirit is not yet lifted. Foundations getting friendly with our comrades; no one fears, nor necessarily have to fear for… the modern poet. 

While I do enjoy a multi-vocal free for all, I am not a psychedelic writer. I am sure of what world my narrators are living in as well as what carceral proverbs my narrators want to liken society to. It is my business to know the socio-military locations of metaphors; to have a good hand for psyche-art; for facilitating a dual haunting (to be both the revolutionary and the sum of all inanimate objects) in the face of fears of individual and collective annihilation. A poet becomes a house for lightning.

Your craft is your universe. A universe that you interfere with. Acknowledge that. There is no pure third person. If you are not a pure third person, be true to that. Define phenomena through the lens of participation.

Gentrification means that I write poems next to San Francisco. Politicians legislate next to reality. As survivors, we share first-date spirituals. Hopefully by the time a fascist secures all of their cool points, my love will have found a way to hide me. Or blues people will forgive me for all the wrong turns I took off of the fifth fret of a guitar, like my longitude completely re-colonized. Sweeping my left hand over the frets until there is no city left.

A politician promises to end apartheid soon; shakes the clock parts out of their wig to prove their change of heart.

I am a shell of my former knowledge of hip hop. Forgive me for the living rooms I co-wrote with a day’s surrender to the ruling class. Traumatized by a life of open-air intake; losing my grasp of poetry; hordes of voices slipping to the back of my mind like nails falling into construction site dirt.

A poet is a nobody. A vagrant (who enjoyed school) walking in a reader’s head; walking up from the back of a reader’s mind; or a curious, young mirror image who runs to and from social conditioning; playing your shadow or your subtitle. A fun way to interpret an extinction-level government.

All I see are sharecropper shacks and neoliberal free association. Subject matter come to life only to cut their own lives short. Big names in our genocide. I am a blues person with a slave ship sailing through my motel room. I want to write about someone waving.

What do you read to the blood on the floor?

Will I live to see the best of my generation?

I went to sleep with 21st century revolutionary friends and woke up with the sun missing. In several states in the U.S., Latinx people, on the frontlines of surplus value slavery, are twice the percentage of Covid-19 cases than they are the percentage of the state population. In Louisiana, Black people are 33% of the population, but 70% of Covid-19 deaths. Throughout the U.S., similar ratios are the apple pie of the American medical reality. When I write poems, I peal back material reality and get the feeling that a genocidal superstructure is satisfied with disaster, but only for now. 

One day I started thinking on paper in a McCoy Tyner kind of way; like Martin Luther King Jr.’s right-hand apparition; or like a gallows koan. In a society of boot-dwellers, my great grandmother would not want me to call it any other way. Red Summer in my latest chords. Live from late-stage imperialism; the poem goes well for a day or two.